Lojban(en.wikipedia.org) |
During a recent conversation, I realized that a lot of the community dysfunction there is the typical contrarian trap: If you're doing something sufficiently unusual, the vast majority of the people who show up to work on it with you are going to be extremely opinionated contrarians more-interested in personal experimentation than in working to make something solid and accessible to a general audience, and not particularly interested in cooperating or otherwise working together. Most of the people who are interested in pragmatic applications are going to just use something already widely used. The lojban community, when I was active in it, had a huge variety of interesting ideas that nobody was ever following up on or implementing, and the big projects people agreed were important (completing a document standardizing a new version of the language) languished. There were pretty regularly complaints about the community infrastructure (website, wiki, mailing list) that were answered with "If you're passionate about this, please feel free to fix it, or take over running it yourself. I want to hand these off and stop being the only responsible person. I'll give you commit access, root access on the servers, etc." that were almost never actually accepted.
So, basically like almost every open-source project out there. ;)
Before anyone asks, it wasn't because I was speaking Toki Pona to them. I only speak it to friends that also know it, it's just that sometimes there are other people around.
In other words, Esperanto is the worse-is-better universal language. Unfortunately for both Esperanto and Lojban, English is worse-is-better than both.
WRT English, there's nothing inherent to it that makes it the lingua franca of the world, it's just that it's the language of the dominating socio-economic powers since the British Empire. How quickly Mandarin is becoming popular around the world is a modern evidence to how economics play a role in determining the cultural appreciation of a particular country.
And "the knowledge of Esperanto can be transferred to other prominent languages"? Only in the most cursory ways! Esperanto's vocabulary is also deeply minimal: for example, it makes antonyms from the prefix mal-, so that 'big' is granda and 'small' is malgranda, and it makes heavy use of affixes and word-combining to generate new chunks of vocabulary: a school is a learn-place (lernejo), lunch is day-eating (tagmanĝo), a dictionary is a word-group (vortaro), and so forth. This is great for making a minimal vocabulary that can be easily learned, but it means that you get only a tiny fragment of knowledge that's transferrable to other languages.
I could go on about how the structure is actually deeply unnatural and reflects several odd choices, or how the pronunciation involves tricky to near-impossible consonant clusters (e.g. because s is pronounced as 'ts', the word eksciis 'realize' has the cluster kssts!), but it's really not a well put-together language in the way that this seems to imply it is.
I've some good Esperanto books I chew on and lately I've been looking into Elefen and Ikthuil.
https://gist.github.com/melopee/2f8cd71fa628a11c3dbfd39e2db4...
Now and then I look into it, where it is, etc. One thing I could not get past was that the language is ugly. It’s very hard on the ears - I say this speaking English, Japanese, and some Spanish and have taken a few years of Mandarin, so perhaps it’s a taste thing, but I’ve heard lots of people say this over the years and I agree with it.
It seems to me that a grammar based on strictly right (or left) branching (that's prefix or postfix notation, or Polish or reverse Polish notation, for the programmers and mathematicians out there) would eliminate the need for all these optional terminators (which are effectively optional parentheses to clarify the order of operations).
The ʻokina is sort of a precedent for this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_language#Glottal_stop
although then people can have humongous arguments over whether it's correct to write it with ʻ, `, ', or other alternatives.
Edit: The Lojban “'” can also be considered not to be a real phoneme but to be more like a gilde sound between two vowels.
But maybe the glottal stop is only in German not considered to be a phoneme. (Actually it is more of a short pause, the snap is only an easy but not necessary way to do it.)
I have heard other Esperantists describe the document as maybe harsher than it needs to be, grouping in the mountains with the mole-hills, but I think most of the things it describes are pretty uncontroversially considered to be flaws with respect to the language's original intent. Most of the speakers I interact with would say, "Yes, but what's your point?" But on the other hand, neither I nor the Esperantists I interact with regularly tend to be the types that think Esperanto still has a viable chance of becoming a true international language: we simply think it's a fun language to learn and speak. So it's possible that more radical Esperantists would disagree with our position there!
For the rest, I really appreciate the "insider" view you give. A couple points, though:
- It's not said that a language that borrows a word will keep its original pronunciation too. The very word pronunciation, for example, the various pronunciations thereof in English, French, Italian, Spanish would not be easily recognisable as a cognate to the untrained ear. "Transformation rules" need to be learnt to make use of vocabulary similarities across languages.
- The "near-impossible consonant clusters" do occur in many natural languages. Armenian and Georgian, for one, are known for some wild consonant clusters they have. Furthermore, that "ksts" one exists in English: texts, sexts; and not radically more difficult than say the greek φθάνω.